With an average lifespan of 78 years (and falling, at least in the U.S.), humans are exceptionally long-lived mammals. Everyone is familiar with the sadly short lives of the dogs and cats that live with us, and even horses rarely make it past 30. Cows have a lifespan of about 20 years, though very few make it to that point without … serving other purposes.
But size plays a factor. Very small mammals often live very short lives. Mice are old at two, and it’s the rare rabbit who lives a decade. At the other end of the spectrum, hippos are often good for more than 50 years and several elephants have been known to top 80. Still, both elephants and people are physical and chronological mites beside the true giants.
There are whales living right now who still carry within their bodies the points of harpoons hurled during the days when the oil from their flesh lit the lamps of the world. There are animals in the Atlantic who were witness to not just the naval traffic of World War II, but the great liners of the early 20th century and the naval blockade of the American Civil War. There are whales swimming today who were already sliding beneath the waves when a former school teacher and sailor wrote Moby Dick.
As Smithsonian Magazine reports, the Bowhead whale, known for frequenting the Arctic, is a chronological giant among giants. Individuals examined have been estimated at 211 years, making it entirely possible that there are still whales alive who are older than the United States.
That age is humbling, if not staggering. But it also helps explain why these animals’ recovery from the period of heavy hunting of whales is still far from complete. These aren’t creatures who reproduce quickly and turn over generations like autumn leaves. They are centuries coming and going, and the recovery of their population is a thing of millenia.
By the most direct measure, Bowheads are staging a good comeback. The harvest of these whales only began in earnest around 1848, after other more easily hunted and oil-rich species were all but exhausted—and only three years before Melville wrote “Call me Ishmael.” By the turn of the 20th century, when hunting slowed, only an estimated 1,000 animals remained. Today there are around 14,000. But that’s far from where they were, and there’s more to worry about than hunting.
Maybe the most amazing thing about the Bowhead’s great age is that we don’t know the true limits. The oldest animals around today are merely those few who were wily or lucky enough to be among the 1,000 or so who escaped hunters until laws and rising use of other fuels ended most whaling around 1915. When whalers began hunting the Bowhead in 1848, their first victims were the largest whales they could find. How old were those whales? Even if they were no older than whales alive today, some of those whales were alive when Charles I fled England ahead of the English Civil War, and when Rembrandt painted The Night Watch, and when the Ming Dynasty fell in China, and when John Punch became the first African slave in the colony of Virginia.
The generation that came before today’s whales was there when America was a dream. The next generation may still be swimming the oceans when it is a memory. For them, our lives are like those of our pets. Energetic … but brief.
But there’s no guarantee these chronological giants will swim into the next century. As oceans fill with plastic and the basic ecosystem is challenged by pollution and climate change, the whale’s future is far from certain. Bowheads spend their entire lives in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters of the Bering and Beaufort seas. Changes in their movements and feeding have already been connected to the warming of those waters and changes in polar ice. It’s unclear how the continuing warming of the globe will affect the tiny organisms that form the great bulk of their food.
Bowheads have a lot to teach us, and it’s more than just being living examples of history. Many large animals are highly subject to cancer—more cells, more opportunities for cells to go bad—but Bowheads seem incredibly resistant to cancer and other diseases associated with aging. They carry within their genes the coding that helps them repair accumulated damage.
The genome of the Bowhead whale has been sequenced. Maybe the knowledge it reveals will allow the whales to share their long lives with us—if only we take a longer view.
